You shall not rest. Counter-Strike certainly won’t.
We’ve barely left IEM Rio behind us but there’s another LAN event on our screens: Elisa Masters Espoo 2022. No, it’s not pronounced like that, don’t worry 💩
Two round-robin groups of six decent (including fnatic, ENCE, and BIG) to bad (Astralis, Bad News Eagles) teams have finished already, with the favourites mostly making it through.
With one big surprise: 500.
Having been signed to a new organisation at the end of October, SHiPZ and co. stormed into Finland with a point to prove and frags to bag.
Their victims en route to playoffs included Complexity (16-14), Bad News Eagles (16-8), SAW (19-17), and least shockingly, Astralis.
What was shocking was the manner in which Astralis shat the bed.
After a 1-14 T-half against fnatic that ended 7-16, they only went and did it again. This time though, their opponents didn’t give them any pity rounds.
500 won the pistol and the follow-up, to give Astralis their second most embarrassing 16-1 defeat of all time.
Astralis, for their part, recovered to make playoffs by beating (and eliminating) Complexity 19-17 in their final best-of-one. But that doesn’t mean we have to be nice to them.
The reason dev1ce isn’t here is because they wanted to ease him in and “create room for [his] best version”. They just forgot that, maybe, just maybe, we’d have wanted to see a decent version of Astralis.
Final Group A standings:
Final Group B standings:
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